


Fatality

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Canon, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:12:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7457433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are times when Dahl really has to wonder what she did to deserve this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fatality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedibuttercup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/gifts).



There are times when Dahl really has to wonder what she did to deserve this. 

Walking into that shitty bar on that shitty, rainy, muddy planet, so far out past the back of beyond she wasn't even sure she had an adequately shitty metaphor for it, was the last thing Dahl felt like doing the day she did it. The situation being as it was, she did it anyway. 

"Well, well," Riddick said, just like he'd been expecting her and it hadn't been three fucking years, and he kicked out a seat at his table in a way she guessed was meant to be an invitation. She felt ten times more inclined to break the chair over Riddick's smug head than to sit herself down, but sitting's what she did. She took a seat, deliberately, cautiously, the way she'd been trained, because who the fuck even knew what Riddick might decide to do at any given moment? 

"Decide to take me up on my offer?" Riddick said. 

"You seriously overestimate my interest in your dick," she replied.

He grinned. It wasn't a good look on him. "So you're here to take me in?" he asked. "I might even let you put me in cuffs if you ask real nice."

She sighed. She put her gun down on the table and ran the fingers of both hands through her rain-wet hair, already exasperated. The son of a bitch had that effect. And he tilted his head at her, drummed his fingers on the table as he apparently give the situation his consideration. 

"Oh," he said, and raised his brows. "Well, shit, I didn't see that coming." Somehow, the bastard's shit-eating grin got even wider, and he leaned forward on the rickety-ass table. "You came for my help."

She grimaced but she didn't disagree. The hell of it was he was right. 

\---

The others were at Ursa Luna when the Necromongers came, turning in a bounty. Dahl wasn't there. 

She was born on a good planet to good parents in good jobs who did good work and made good money. She went to a good school, even after her parents died because her mom's parents were good people, too, and wanted good things for her. Dahl had never been interested in good; she wanted bad, she wanted wrong, and she just plain wanted out. 

When she was nineteen years old and studying to be a doctor because that was what her entire family had done for generations, that was when her grandparents died. She quit college and she went out to the military academy three systems over, thinking she'd switch her white coat and stethoscope for combat boots and a rifle. They put her in a prissy uniform and tried to teach her math and physics and combat tactics, put her into a class of military medics and it was just like it had always been. She never even fired a gun while she was there. The only hand-to-hand practice she got was in the fights she started.

"You can leave or we can expel you," the academy CO told her as she stood not quite at attention in his office. "We don't think you're the right fit, cadet." 

She laughed and shook her head. "You don't fucking say," she said, and she turned and left the room. Officially, she left of her own volition. She couldn't've given less of a fuck what her official record said if she'd been paid to. And while her family had left her money, she guessed what she needed then was a paying job. 

Her first crew was the worst but they taught her to shoot. She picked up with them on a crappy-ass world that was the farthest place from the academy that the credits in her pocket would get her to and still leave her some for drinks, and once she'd punched their handsy 2IC straight in the face, the boss asked her to sit down and have a drink. It lasted two months before she jumped ship; they maybe thought she was pissed off with the life, close quarters, all the time in space, but she didn't give a fuck for that - what was lacking was professionalism, not a kingsize bed. 

Eighteen months later, tracking a convict out of Corovan, her third shitty team ran up against something different. Their competition was organised, well-trained and well-equipped. They wore uniforms, but not the prissy-ass academy kind, the kind you'd expect on a soldier. They followed orders. No petty in-fighting, no arguments about their cut. It took no time at all for Dahl to know that that was what she wanted. 

"I want to join your crew," she told the boss, a man called Johns, who looked her up and down and told her no. 

"I want to join your crew," she told him six days later, when she laid the bounty out with the butt of her gun. He hit the floor at Boss Johns' feet. 

He nodded. "Grab your shit and come aboard," he said. "We're wheels up in twenty."

She went with them and she never looked back. They trained her; she was already good, but they made her better. She made her way through the ranks, made herself valuable, made herself indispensable. And then, when their 2IC bought the farm ten years later, she was the one Johns asked to take his place. 

The others were at Ursa Luna when the Necromongers came, turning in a bounty. Dahl wasn't there; she was on the supply run, her turn to go though she fucking hated every minute, bartering for crap like she gave a damn. 

She wasn't there. She's never quite forgiven herself for that. 

\---

"You know they're dead, right?" Riddick said, when she told him what she wanted. 

Dahl scowled. Her hand went for the gun she'd put down on the tabletop, and Riddick wagged his finger at her. 

"I sure as hell know it," he told her. "So why the hell don't you?"

She didn't reply to that. She just told him someone told her he'd know how to find them, how to get in, and she'd pay him to help her get to them. She didn't say it was because she needed to see for herself if her crew was gone.

"I look like I need credits, Dahl?"

She shrugged. "I wasn't talking about money," she said. When he flashed her a fucking lascivious grin, she shook her head and sighed. "There you go thinking with your dick again. I've got a contact who'll clean your ID. No more mercs. Don't you like the sound of that?"

He liked the sound of it. He agreed, if she'd keep her mouth shut and do things his way. He said there were a few stops he needed to make first. She said that was fine, she had arrangements to make, too.

She ordered a whiskey in an old merc bar on Centauri 2 three days later. When the barman asked what her boyfriend wanted, she slammed his face into the bartop. Riddick laughed; they left. 

She bought a new gun in the back of a ship on Lazarus 4. When the salesman asked if she was buying for her boyfriend, she cocked the gun and put it to his head. The look on her face must've said something because when she pulled the trigger, the guy had forgotten it wasn't loaded. Riddick laughed; they left. 

On Noctis Prime a month later, Dahl met her contact and they all talked Riddick's future. After, they got into a fight, because some jackass called her sweetheart and pinched her ass while she was flirting with the barmaid, so she elbowed him in the face for it. His buddies got involved, drunk off their asses, and then Riddick was there and that was that. They fought back to back, fucking flirting as they did it, and when they were done they left with smiles on their faces. 

Back in the ship they shared, Dahl's ship, they dabbed at their split knuckles with antiseptic. When he made a pass at her, unsubtle, she raised her brows in warning and he just laughed out loud. 

"Thought I'd give it one last try," he said. "Don't you worry, I got the message back there loud and clear." 

He bandaged her hands then she did his. And then they made for the Necromonger fleet.

\---

There was some guy called Krone that Riddick killed, like that made any odds to Dahl. 

They went in, just the two of them, knives tucked into belts and boots and their guns drawn out of holsters. No one came to intervene, just like Riddick had predicted as they'd docked, and she guessed his fucking far-fetched story had turned out to be true. Who knew, the insufferable ass turned out to be the one true king of the fucking Necromongers. 

And when they asked the Necromonger marshal about her crew, he said they'd been purified. Riddick told her that meant they were gone; from the look on his face when he said it, she knew she should believe him. They left the way they'd come. 

Three days later, they hit an inhabited system, and Dahl got a message through to her contact back in the real world, on a planet that wasn't some shitty backwater, the kind Riddick seemed to favor though she had a feeling that might change once his ID cleared like magic. When they looked up Richard B. Riddick in Dahl's bounty log after that, his photo was changed. The fucking hilarious part was his new ID called him William J. Johns.

"Where you headed next?" Riddick asked, pocketing his ID card. 

Dahl shrugged. "I'll figure it out as I go," she said. 

"You want a drink first?" 

Why not, she guessed. 

The new bounty notice came in while they were on their third drink; there was a proximity alert as the guy in question was just the next planet over. She looked at the comm pad then shoved it back into her pocket; ten minutes later, she took it back out and slapped it down onto the table. 

"Where are _you_ headed next?" she asked, and slid the pad across to him. 

He laughed. One more drink in that shitty little bar and they left the place together, not apart. 

As far as crews go, she's had a hell of a lot worse than him. She's had insubordinate assholes and incompetent fuckwits, male chauvinist jackasses who've either left or changed their tune once she's broken their nose. She's had homicidal fucking maniacs intent on killing legally. What she's got these days is Richard B. Riddick, playing at William J. Johns. Sometimes, riding with him's just like riding with Johns, but mostly it's not.

There are times when she wonders what she did to deserve this, like when they're sitting in a bar competing over women. Sometimes he gets the girl and sometimes she does, sometimes she kicks him off the ship for privacy but she's had no privacy in fifteen years or more so sometimes she just lets him listen, what the hell. Sometimes they both strike out and they go back to the ship or a room together, they play cards and they drink and they flirt, as much as you can call what they do flirting when she slaps him round the back of his idiot head that one really, really didn't almost end up in a box. That dick Santana should've known better. 

There are times she wonders what she did to deserve this, her parents, her family, her crew. On the bad days, she fights, starts them or just finishes them instead, and Riddick seems to get it because he's right there with her and afterwards, in a rented room or on the ship they share, they patch each other up and pointedly don't talk about it. He asks her what her first name is instead - she tells him she's just _Dahl_ , though he could just look at her ID and find that shit out for himself - and he tells her fucked-up stories till all she's got left to do is laugh or cry: she laughs, and she pours them both a drink. 

"It wasn't fate," Riddick tells her, as she stares into space from the co-pilot's seat, on their way to take another bounty. He thinks it's fucking hilarious that they're meant to take the guy to Ursa Luna; she doesn't ask how many times he broke out of Slam City because she doesn't need to: she's got a copy of his rap sheet saved. The Necros took the planet, but they left Ursa Luna Penal Facility the fuck alone, like some kind of universal irony. "And it wasn't your fault."

"I know," she says. She knows. It wasn't her fault that what happened happened. And really, fuck fate. She wants nothing to do with destiny or prophesies or kismet or karma or any of that cosmic bullshit, just like Riddick doesn't. He gets it. He gets her. The times when she doesn't want to punch him in the jaw, she appreciates that. Hell, the times when she wants to and the times when she goes ahead and does it, she appreciates it too; then they fight till they're fucked-up and laughing because everything is a fucking hilarity when you've got nothing left to lose.

They're on their way to Ursa Luna. And she'll get through it, she'll get past it, and there'll be another bounty waiting after. There's always someone else to catch. They're good at it. She figures Riddick spent enough time being hunted that he knows how to hunt.

\---

So, there are times when Dahl wonders what she did to deserve this, mostly when Riddick's grinning his smug Furyan ass off and she wants to smack him clear into the middle of next week. But, mostly, she knows it was all just chance. Looking out into space right now, on the way to Ursa Luna where she should've been but wasn't, she knows she didn't deserve it at all.

She lost everything that day she wasn't there at Ursa Luna, or she had everything stolen, because the Necromongers took it. And she knows Riddick never had much to lose to begin with.

She lost everything. But after that, maybe she found something too.


End file.
